Knowledge as Liberation from Domination

Sor Juana's intellectual pursuit was fundamentally an act of liberation—knowledge allowed her to articulate her own existence beyond others' definitions and control. She understood that ignorance keeps the dominated dependent and defenseless. This framework illuminates animal rights: much exploitation persists through deliberate non-knowledge. People avoid understanding slaughterhouse conditions, factory farming realities, or animal cognition to maintain comfortable complicity. The moral progress Sor Juana championed through education and truth-telling extends to animal consideration—genuine liberation from exploitation requires confronting what we know and refuse to know about animal life. Her insistence on the right to learn and investigate models how knowledge production itself becomes an ethical practice. For animals, this means creating spaces to study their consciousness, emotional lives, and social structures not as resource inventory but as moral education, building the epistemic foundation for their fuller moral recognition and potential freedom from domination.